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How Europe's oldest language ended up on US trees

The letter dice gameUS' Basque immigrants turned to sheepherding in order to survive. Today, their legacy can be found in unique wooden tree carvings they left throughout the American West.

I?aki Arrieta Baro remembers the day he trekked through the sagebrush, desert and wooded trails of Northern Nevada with a Basque-American family to locate a very special ancestral heirloom. Tracing their grandfather's footsteps, the group followed GPS coordinates to a remote location on what is now a private ranch.

Among a grove of aspens, they found what they were looking for: a tree engraved decades ago with their grandfather's name.

"We were standing in the same place where their grandfather stood," says Arrieta Baro, head librarian of the Jon Bilbao Basque Library at the University of Nevada, Reno. "It was very emotional."

Between the US Pacific coast and the state of Wyoming, stories from the region's 19th and 20th-Century Basque immigrant sheepherders unfold across the malleable bark of quaking aspen trees, turning rugged alpine forests into history books. From names and cartoon images to hometown homages and political messages etched in Euskara, Europe's oldest living language, these arborglyphs – tree carvings – offer a quiet glimpse into these often forgotten lives.

"The arborglyphs are a lens through which to understand the Basque immigrant community and sheepherding," says Arrieta Baro.

Carefully placing a piece of tree trunk in front of me, he directs my attention to its inscription: "Jesús María El Cano, 26-7."

El Cano was one of many Basque men who found themselves at the helm of sheep flocks in the American West. Initially drawn to the Great Basin region across California, Nevada and Idaho in the wake of the 19th-Century gold rush, Basques continued to migrate through the next century in search of better economic prospects.

Amaya Herrera, curator at the Basque Museum and Cultural Center and one of an estimated 16,000 Basque-Americans living in Boise, Idaho, descends from one such family. "My great-grandparents immigrated in the late 1890s. They worked in ranching and then later ran a boarding house in Northern Nevada," she says, "That's how my family ended up there."

Boarding houses like the one managed by Herrera's great-grandparents were the infrastructural beginnings of Basque communities in the West, such as Boise's Basque Block. They provided not just lodging, but a place to connect with other Basques and, very importantly, find employment.

Though the newly-arrived Basques had no previous experience with large-scale herding, they adopted the vocation out of necessity –?primarily because they spoke little to no English.

According to Arrieta Baro, there are many places to see arborglyphs in the wild. A guide is not required; just a keen eye.

Near Reno, Nevada, hike Whites Creek Trail leading up to Mount Rose.

In Idaho's Wood River Valley, follow Eagle Creek Road to Neal Canyon to find a grove with carvings of a boarding house, illustrations, names and dates.

In California, head to the aspen groves around Page Meadows on the western side of Lake Tahoe, or take Horse Meadow Trail in the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the elevated meadow where many carvings have also been documented.

There is a small arborglyph collection at the Basque Museum and Cultural Center in Boise and the Jon Bilbao Basque Library in Reno, which also houses an extensive digital collection. Head to the Trailing of the Sheep Festival (8-12 October 2025) in Hailey, Idaho, for a virtual reality arborglyph tour and a researcher-led presentation.

Sheepherding didn't require much speaking at all.

"They spent a lot of time in the mountains by themselves," says Arrieta Baro, referring to the transhumance herding technique that saw sheepherders move flocks up to the mountains to graze during the spring and summer and back down to the valleys for the colder seasons. These long stints of isolation were as unfamiliar to the Basques as the landscape.

Far from their families and homeland, the sheepherders turned to the trees in their solitude, whittling messages and illustrations to communicate "their inner selves, their emotions, how much they miss gure ama", Arrieta Baro explains, adding that gure amameans "our mother" in Euskara.

Spoken today by upwards of 900,000 people in the Basque regions on both sides of the Pyrenees is Europe’s great linguistic mystery: unrelated to any other living language, with roots thought to predate Indo-European tongues.

That Euskara is the lone survivor of an unknown language family dating back to Neolithic times only amplifies the mystery of finding messages like "Gora Euskadi" (Up with the Basque Country) on trees thousands of miles away.

Since early researchers like Basque-American Joxe Mallea Olaetxe began documenting arborglyphs in the 1960s, the trees have garnered attention from academics, Basque descendants and others curious about the unique cultural artefacts. Collectively, they've helped amass more than 25,000 recordings of arborglyphs in photographs, muslin fabric rubbings and, most recently, 3D photogrammetry images.

Among their observations was the herders' clear choice of canvas: Quaking Aspens, typically in meadows with "lots of forage for the sheep and a source of water", said Jean Earl in an interview with the Archaeological Legacy Institute in 2015. A Nevada native, Earl began recording carvings alongside her husband on camping trips in the 1970s.

Common arborglyph findings include short poems, erotic messages, human portraits and animal figures – though never any sheep – while stiff sketches of Basque farmhouses and buildings suggest a degree of homesickness. Some illustrations are so intact that Arrieta Baro believes he's identified a carving of the town of Iru?a's City Hall. The most prevalent type of carvings, however, are names and dates. So-called "calendar trees" show herders coming back to the same spots year after year to record their visits.

"Traditionally, the Basque peasants and farmers, because of the oral nature of their society, had written little or nothing," writes Joxe Mallea Olaetxe in his book Speaking Through the Aspens, "But in the American West, these nearly illiterate people were somehow persuaded to change and started to write, not with pen and paper but with knives on trees"

But the carvings are fragile. Aspens rarely live beyond a century, and drought, wildfire and disease accelerate their decline. Earl noted in 2021 that around 80% of the trees she recorded had since died.

At the time of writing, the Jakes Fire has burned more than 80,000 acres in Elko County, Nevada – an area where researchers suspect far more arborglyphs exist than have been collected.

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That most of the arborglyphs are on government property poses an additional concern. When the initial proposal of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was made public in June 2025, millions of acres of public lands across the West were poised to be sold for logging, new developments and other private uses. Public objection pressured lawmakers to scrap the sell-off from final legislation, but preservationists fear similar attempts could come in the future.

Aspiring "arborglyph hunters" can help the Jon Bilbao Basque Library by exploring areas where they believe large concentrations of unrecorded arborglyphs exist, namely the Jarbidge Wilderness just north of Elko, Nevada around Jarbidge-Charleston County Road near Dead Horse Creek. As general guidance, herders typically made camp and carvings in areas around streams or creeks and open meadows.

Report your findings in the arborglyph database or contact I?aki Arrieta Baro with further questions

The US Forest Service strictly forbids vandalising trees by making new carvings. Do not trespass on private property while searching for arborglyphs.

Arrieta Baro describes efforts to document the arborglyphs before they disappear as a "race against the clock" – one he would like to run alongside the local community.

"We hope people will take the opportunity to share what they find," he says, referring to the arborglyph database where anyone who stumbles across carvings in the wild can report their findings. He adds that there are far more arborglyphs in the Jarbidge Wilderness than have been collected because researchers can only cover so much ground themselves. They are hopeful that taking an all-hands-on-deck approach and involving the outdoor community will ensure even more trees are recorded before they inevitably disappear, and with them, part of the Basque immigrant story.

Like all trees, there's a hidden kinship between aspens deep within the earth. But North America's most widely distributed tree is exceptionally communal, with every aspen actually part of a larger organism. Entire groves comprised of 40,000 individual trees are supported through a single root system, warranting these genetic clones the nickname "forest of one".

For an immigrant group whose work was defined by seclusion, yet whose carvings reveal a longing for connection, it feels apt.

"The carvings aren't just for aesthetic purposes," says Arrieta Baro, "It was a way to say 'I am here.' It shows the human need to connect themselves to the place where they are."

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